My Traitor's Heart; A South African Exile Returns to Face His Country, His Tribe, and His Conscience

New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1990. First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. Benjamin Ford (author photograph). 24 cm. [8], 349, [3] pages. Rian Malan (born 1954, in Johannesburg) is a South African author, journalist, documentarist and songwriter of Afrikaner descent. He first rose to prominence as the author of the memoir My Traitor's Heart, which, like the bulk of his work, deals with South African society in a historical and contemporary perspective and focuses on racial relations. As a journalist, he has written for major newspapers in South Africa, Britain and the United States. To avoid conscription, which was compulsory for all white males, he moved to Los Angeles in 1977 and worked as a journalist. Returning to South Africa in the 1980s, he wrote My Traitor's Heart, his memoir of growing up in Apartheid-era South Africa in which he explores race relations through prominent murder cases. In addition, he reflects on the history of his family, a prominent Afrikaner clan that migrated to the Cape in the 17th century and included Daniel Malan, the South African Prime Minister who was a principal ideological force behind Apartheid doctrine. The book, which became a bestseller, was translated into 11 languages. In 2000, he wrote in Rolling Stone about the origin of the song "The Lion Sleeps Tonight", tracing its history from its first recording by Solomon Linda, a Zulu singer, through its adoption by The Weavers and many of the folk singers of the 1960s, and its appropriation by The Walt Disney Company in the movie The Lion King. Malan reveals that Linda never received any royalties; however, a court case established that 25 percent of the song's past and future royalties should go to Linda's three daughters. Derived from a Kirkus review: Here, Malan, whose credentials are impeccable--a great-nephew of the prime minister who introduced apartheid to South Africa, and an exile at one point because of his refusal to serve in that nation's military--offers one of the most coldly realistic yet compassionate accounts of contemporary South Africa to be published in recent years. Using the example of a distant ancestor who fled the Cape in the late 18th century so that he could live with his slave mistress--thus flouting the barriers set up between the races--but who later was hanged by the British for his role in a rebellion protesting British leniency to the blacks, Malan reveals how this typically paradoxical response has been responsible for the present impasse. The behavior of both groups has all too often been provoked by fear: fear of race, of tribe, of change. Growing up in the 1950's, Malan rebelled against his Afrikaner heritage. He worked as a journalist on one of the major Johannesburg dailies, making friends with many activists, black and white. After the 1976 uprisings, he fled to the US because he could no longer avoid military service and because he was scared of the changes coming, or the "consequences of them not coming." In short, as he says, he ran away from the paradox. He returned in the early 80's to a much changed place, but the paradox still continued. And it's this paradox that he sets out to explore by examining a number of cases involving violence--white on black, black on white, and black on black. His resolution is more metaphysical than political, but perhaps the latter will never succeed without the former in a country deeply religious despite its terrible transgressions Malan's colloquial tone gives this heartfelt confession of his fears, contradictions, hopes, and love a compelling immediacy. It is an important and timely book.